Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/82

72 The traveler Kohl mentions a landlord in Kent Square, Liverpool, who combined his restaurant with an emigrant boarding-house, and won many wagers by his almost infallible faculty for recognizing the nationality of his boarders: without asking them to speak, without taking any cognizance of the peculiarities of their dress, he scrutinized their features, and promptly announced the result of his observation.

Dr. Gellmayer, a druggist of Troppau, in Austrian Silesia, had for years the casting vote on every lunacy commission of his native province. He distinguished between chronic and transient ("emotional") insanity, and recognized the former exclusively by physiognomic symptoms. "I could approximately describe that expression," says he, "by comparing it to the peculiar look of a person who has forgotten something, and is trying in vain to recollect it. In the large subdivision of misanthropic lunatics that look is combined with a certain peevish furtiveness of the eye." When his colleagues wished to release a doubtful patient, Dr. Gellmayer sometimes withheld his opinion, but his averse decisions proved always correct.

Could Spurzheim have deduced such verdicts from craniological indications?

 

HE British Lion to be dealt with in the following pages is not that of the heralds, nor is it the amiable, shy, rather tame animal just now crouching down behind "the silver streak," pretending to fear lest the foreigner should get at him unawares through a tunnel, nor yet is it the ephemeral much-to-be-pitied creature of the drawing-room. It is a lion, indeed, the king of beasts, the story of whose coming into Britain is a part of the greater story of his sojourn in Europe, that can not be told properly without discussing the ancient geography and climate, or without dealing with some vexed points in historical criticism. It is a story which begins in the remote geological past, revealed by pickaxe and shovel, and ends, well within the frontier of history, in the works of ancient Greek writers.

The first view which we get of the lion in Britain in the geological record is in the valley of the lower Thames, at Grays Thurrock and Ilford in Essex, and at Crayford and Erith in Kent. The strata in those places consist of loams, sands, and gravels swept down by the Thames when it flowed at a height of at least seventy feet above its present level, and swung in a series of bold curves from side to side in the broad valley in which London stands, with a swifter current than at the present time. They are all of the same general character, and the brick-field at Crayford presents us with a most convenient 